Transcript

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>> As Apple gears up for its annual developers conference on Monday, there are some grumblings by app makers that it's getting harder to make a living. Eight years after its launch, the app store is flooded with nearly 2 million apps and 14,000 more arriving each week making it harder to get eyeballs, especially for indie developers, some of whom were able to capture large audiences in the Store's early days.

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Now the top apps are mostly games funded by studios, or apps from household names like Pandora or Netflix. All this comes as iPhone sales slow and Apple needs all the help it can get from the app store, says Reuter's reporter Julia Love.>> Right now, the app store is a source of differentiation for Apple.

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It's a collection of apps. Many of which are exclusive to the iPhone. And so if we're instead operating on software that runs across platforms then Apple loses that edge.>> In fact some technologists envision artificial intelligence assistance like Siri to help us navigate the plethora of apps or eliminate the need for apps altogether.

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But when it comes to AI, Google, whose AlphaGo program beat the world champion in Go this year, is seen to have the upper hand. And Google is tooling up its AI assistant this summer with the launch of its messaging app, Allo, heating up the competition to serve us.

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Apple is aware of the challenge and tells Reuters big change is on the way to help make the app store more profitable for developers and even introducing app search ads in the store.